Collette Dinnigan bids farewell to high-end fashion

Unlike the long list of those in the industry who have hit the skids, Collette Dinnigan insists that she is not in financial trouble. The business is profitable and there is no debt, she says.
Photo: Louie Douvis

Twenty-four years after she started in fashion and following a fruitless two-year search for a business partner who could help her scale up, Collette Dinnigan has decided to shut up shop.

By year’s end Australia’s most internationally acclaimed fashion designer will have closed her eponymous boutiques in Sydney, Melbourne and London and stopped producing the high-end bridal and evening attire on which her reputation has been built and which she now sells worldwide.

Her well-received Paris show, held this month, will be the last of the twice-yearly shows she has held in the French capital since 1995. The dramatic scaling down of her business will see about 40 of her 50-odd staff lose their jobs.

Dinnigan (centre) receives applause from models, including Denmark's Helena Christensen, (left) at the end of her Autumn/Winter 1998-99 ready-to-wear fashion collection in Paris.
Photo: Reuters

Unlike the long list of those in the industry who have hit the skids, Dinnigan insists that she is not in financial trouble. The business is profitable and there is no debt, she says.

Rather, the 48-year-old’s time was the crunch point. She needed more of it after giving birth to her second child last November, a son, Hunter, who joins nine-year-old Estella and husband Bradley Cocks, whom she married in mid-2011.

Without a new strategic partner to take some of the management load, in a business that is very heavily reliant on its founder, something had to give. “I am not closing for financial reasons, at all. It has absolutely nothing to do with it," ­Dinnigan says firmly. “This is about finding a way to spend more time with my family."

Will continue design deals

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Dinnigan poses with a model wearing one of her designs, in Paris in 2008.
Photo: Alastair Miller

Her curly-lettered brand will not disappear entirely. She will continue – “for now" – with the parts of the business that require her to design only, where manufacturing and retailing is handled elsewhere. They include her diffusion or more casual, mid-market line, called ­collette by Collette Dinnigan; and her children’s label, Collette Dinnigan Enfant. Both are manufactured offshore and sold not through her own boutiques but through department stores such as David Jones, Neiman Marcus in the US and online sites such as Net-a-porter and Matches Fashion.

She will also continue design deals such as one with Specsavers, for which she will launch a prescription sunglasses range in February, and hosiery for David Jones. She hints at doing more such deals over time, perhaps moving into areas such as homewares, furnishings and even hotels. This kind of work is less time-intensive than running a business, and someone else takes the risk at retail.

Contrast that with the core business epitomised by the hand-beaded, sequined dresses seen on the red carpet and walking up the aisles. For this line, she and her team design everything from the fabric to the finished frocks, hold shows, attend fittings and oversee production, most of which is done in Australia.

The infrastructure she has built up over two decades to sustain it also takes time to manage. And if time was always in short supply, it has been more so since the birth of her son, who is one in November.

Collette Dinnigan (right) with Sarah O’Hare and Lachlan Murdoch at a party to celebrate the opening of her London shop.
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“Before Paris I was working seven days a week, I’d see him in the morning and not see him until the next morning again, and that happened for four weeks. Then I went to Paris and he almost didn’t know me when I got back," Dinnigan says. “ I got back for five days and was on a plane again to Hong Kong. And that was when I went, ‘hang on’. And it has to happen, you have to give it that kind of energy, you can’t just be half pie, or at least I couldn’t."

Right person has proved elusive

Dinnigan has spent two years looking for someone to manage the company and/or invest in it, the latter to allow her to expand the diffusion line into more markets, but the right person proved elusive.

“What I need is somebody to run the business side of it, and I haven’t been able to find somebody who I thought was right for it. And we’ve had extensive searches," she says.

Dinnigan and Miranda Otto at the opening of a Collette Dinnigan boutique in Armadale in 2012.
Photo: Fotogroup

“If they’ve been international they haven’t understood the domestic market, and we’ve even brought people out from Paris or London and they’ve kind of written off David Jones and what we do here, and I think, ‘hang on a minute, you have to understand this is a huge part of our business and is very important to me.’ Or they’re Australian and haven’t understood the international side of the business, which is why it’s so important to show in Paris. "

In the end, she chose not only family, but to retain 100 per cent ownership of the brand she has spent more than two decades building up. Where it will reappear, and whether the closure of the core, highest profile part of the business hurts it, remains to be seen.